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Recommended: Gender In literature
In “How Boys Become men,” Jon Kats shows a list in which boys follow to become men. The list has a set of rules/values which can help during a hitch. In “The Absolute True Diary of a part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie,” Junior the main character has a rough child hood. He was born with 42 teeth, a normal person has only 32 teeth also was born with oversized ears which made him a target. He is an Indian who does not always feel like an Indian.
In The Only Road, the author Alexandra Diaz asks readers to consider the reality of corruption and sacrifice that affects immigrants and refugees, and the resilience it takes to combat it. The theme of sacrifice affects the main characters Jaime and Angela early on in the book. When the cousins are sent to the United States unaccompanied by an adult, they are sacrificing their right to a stable life in their hometown, and embarking on a dangerous journey that is filled with corruption and fear. Money is the only thing that can improve their chances of survival, and even this can not ensure it.
In Deborah Ellis’s The Breadwinner, Parvana is a young woman who must become a boy to get food for the family and I have decided to compare and contrast her to the courageous Harriet Tubman. She lives in a bombed out apartment with her five other family members. Her father was taken away by the surrounding Taliban because of his foreign education. The family has no choice but to cut Parvana’s hair and turn her into a boy so she can be the breadwinner.
One of the first substantial challenges that Parvana faced was that the Taliban arrested her father and took him away because he went to college in England. Because the Taliban didn’t let women go outside alone, Parvana's family had no way of buying and getting food, and they never got fresh air, so they were always grumpy. Since women also weren’t allowed to work, Parvana's family had no way of making money. Because of all of these challenges that Parvana's family faced, her mother was often depressed and sat facing the wall on her toshak for a long time. One day Parvana's family had an idea to send Parvana out into the market dressed up as a boy.
Family members and close friends impact people’s lives in immeasurable ways. Octavia E. Butler uses this to develope Lauren in Parable of the Sower through interactions with the people around her. Growing up in a bleak area of a now dismal United States, her faithful upbringing contrasts with the necessary survival mentality demanded by the outside world. Two effectual characters in Lauren’s journey are her father, Reverend Olamina, and her younger brother, Keith. These two characters represent extremes of both devotion and destruction as they influence Lauren to choose her own path as an adult.
Fires of jubilee is a book written by Steven B Oats, a well known writer who has written many books and his style of writing makes his book popular which has earned him many honorable awards. In this well written interesting book, Oats concentrates on the story of a slave who wanted to be free right from childhood. By using Turner as his main character, Oates creates a lot of pity on the predicament of slaves in the hands of their controlling masters. He frequently uses the word "n-gg-r" to stress the contempt under which Nat Tuner labored, or the word "darkie" to indicate how even the best of whites spoke patronizingly of blacks slaves. There are different occasions in the book where Nats’ life takes unfortunate twists.
Puritan society is often considered to be plain and uninteresting. Modernly, we know Puritans to be the very religious settlers of New England, but what was their life truly like? The Witch of Blackbird Pond is an American historical fiction novel published in 1958, written by Elizabeth George-Speare, which explores topics of Puritan society such as their labors and hardships, and the struggles of non-Puritans living within Puritan communities. Though entirely fictitious, the book portrays the Puritans in a fairly accurate
Maxine Hong Kingston's use of talk stories in The Woman Warrior emphasizes that individuals will find a more fulfilling life if they defy the traditional gender norms place on them by society. While contemplating beauty standards in Chinese society in “No Name Woman” Maxine Kingston thinks, “Sister used to sit on their beds and cry together… as their mothers or their slaves removed the bandages for a few minutes each night and let the blood gush back into their veins” (9). From a young age girls are expected to be binding their feet and are told that it is to look beautiful, but in reality that is not why. When a womans feet are bound they are restrained and silenced. These girls could be free and happy but they are restrained by men through this binding.
A rendition of Cinderella, the story of The Black Cow, changes many renowned characteristics to adapt to Hindu practice and social norms since Indian folk tales “were used to preserve history, important people, and places, as well as the religious rites and ceremonies of various Indian regions” (Gibbs). Instead of a female main character who loses her mother and is left with her father, the story of The Black Cow has a “Brahmin whose wife died leaving him one little son” (Tatar 169). The term “Brahmin son” is repeated many times throughout the story with the purpose of young, normal boys feeling some sort of affiliation to the main character and the ideology that their life can be just like the Brahmin son. The repetition also results in the rhetor eliminating any female-oriented language suggesting a hierarchy of the sexes, saying that males are superior to
To further explain, in the Girl Rising documentary, viewers are taken through the life of a young girl, Suma, in Nepal. She was only six-years-old when her parents exchanged her obedient working hand for money. She was then sent to a home where she would do chores such as washing the dishes, cut firewood and maintain the farm. At her next working home, Suma’s employer’s forced her to eat their scraps, and called her “unlucky girl”. At this home, she was sexually abused, but she did not let that define her.
However, her grandfather only wanted to have a grandson, telling his family, “Things began to go wrong for us when she was born.” His indignant feelings, being in the way of how Paikea was raised, brought the stages of a hero’s journey upon her without her own knowledge. The outcome of this was that Pai was raised like a boy.
In the end her push for equality’s of gender, causes her to be sent to death by the male figure she
By implementing the narrative voice of a young boy, Selvadurai utilizes the backdrop of Arjie’s innocence to introduce the idea that conflicting ideals can lead to confusion and alienation. As someone who has never quite fit the mold of masculinity, Arjie has always felt an underlying sense of helplessness and discontent with external norms. As a child, he would often play with the girls rather than the boys, one of his favorite activities involving his dressing up as a bride. When his parents discover this, they strongly discourage this “funny” behavior, coercing him into trying activities considered more masculine,
In the book The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis, Parvana is the protagonist. She goes through many hardships to keep her family alive. Parvana has to persevere through all of the hardships that are thrown at her. First of all, Parvana also persevered to become a boy.
This highlights the importance of how these acts of cruelty Mariam and Laila faced; ‘fear of the goat, released in the tiger’s cage’ is what ultimately defines their inner feminist strength, ‘over the years/learned to harden’ which shows that Mariam and Laila’s past indirectly prepares them for The Taliban’s arrival. The Taliban take away the basic rights of Mariam and Laila ‘jewellery is forbidden’, but they fail to do so. Ironically, it is the society itself that gives them the strength and platform to strike back against Rasheed, who is a cruel, male-dominating character who symbolised and reinforced everything the term ‘anti-feminist’ stands